argh, sometimes i get so upset using this forum. several times now, i've spent a half hour typing up a nice, detailed post, only to have it erased when i try to attach pictures, and the site tells me the pics are too big. somehow, my post gets deleted.

anyhow, i had a quite eventful time with this recipe this weekend, using balls from the same batch on 2 seperate nights, and having quite different results. i don't have time (anymore) to get into it now, but I do have a question:

sometimes with this crust, the bottom 2 mm or so of the crust has been very dense and tough... when this has happened, i did quite a bit of docking. do you think too much docking could cause that? i docked less on the second run this weekend, and had a much crispier, airy crust... however, i also let this dough rise for about 45 minutes more (plus it sat in the fridge 2 days longer).

i've got pics, but don't have time to resize them and upload now. does anyone know of a way to recover the submitted text when that error occurs? i think instead of just blowing up, the site should instead accept and post the submitted text, and give an error message about the pictures. it'e very frustrating to spend such time on a post, only to have it discarded.

argh, sometimes i get so upset using this forum. several times now, i've spent a half hour typing up a nice, detailed post, only to have it erased when i try to attach pictures, and the site tells me the pics are too big. somehow, my post gets deleted....

i've got pics, but don't have time to resize them and upload now. does anyone know of a way to recover the submitted text when that error occurs? i think instead of just blowing up, the site should instead accept and post the submitted text, and give an error message about the pictures. it'e very frustrating to spend such time on a post, only to have it discarded.

I've had that happen to me a few times. The best thing you can do is get in the habit of creating a backup; copy and paste your text into a text file or word doc on your computer before you hit send, just in case your photos are too big and zap your whole post.

does anyone know of a way to recover the submitted text when that error occurs? i think instead of just blowing up, the site should instead accept and post the submitted text, and give an error message about the pictures. it's very frustrating to spend such time on a post, only to have it discarded.

Hey Loo had some fun with your generic thin dough recipe again this weekend. it worked out suprisingly good. i will get pics next time. i didnt have my camera it was last minute. my wife's son stopped by later last night, hes never had my pizza, i had a dough ball of your dough for a 14in pizza in the fridge...i didnt have an hour to heat the stone so i divided the ball in half. i rolled out both havesvery thin and did not make a rim, they came out about 8-9 inches in diam cranked the gas grill to high. it saturated over 550c in about 10 min. put the skins on a peel with corn meal dusted, on the ski a little olive oil, sauce and whole milk mozz with a dash of oregano. turned the grill down to med opened slid em off, after about 2-3 min i could grab a corner and spin them around. another couple of min they were done. nice and crisp. great grill marks with nice bubble layers, it was very crackery. i didnt do sausage bc i thought the time would be too short. but it was a nice 20-25 min alternative to an hr and ten min oven preheat and cook. cooking the on the stone the 14 in thickness is still my fav tho. but her son loved it! thanks again!

Logged

"My Doctor says I swallow a lot of aggression. Along with a lot of pizzas!!"

One of our members, Norma427, had inquired about used of milk in the formulation or recipe of one of the highly respected pizzerias in Chicago, Vito & Nicks, at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=10887.msg117036#msg117036. To cover this subject separately from the main subject there, my response to the milk ingredient question is continued herein for more discussion as follows:

To Norma,

Good question. This is kind of puzzling to me in that I thought I heard that use of milk in pizza dough mitigates against a crisp crust. And Vito and Nick's -- one of Chicago's many great thin crust pizzas -- is often noted as being a crispy pie, near that of a "crackercrust." Many rave about their crispy crust characteristic. I've been to the great V& N on a number of occasions and generally experienced a great thin crust pizza that is tremendously flavorful and tasty. But on an increasingly number of occasions, the crust hadn't been as crisp as I previously recalled, but instead softer and not so crackerlike. That's why I often refer to their style as semi-cracker crust or even less.

Since viewing the Guy Fieri television show filmed at V & N, I've been very bewildered about the amount of milk that supposedly is added to their formulation. In one way, I can't believe it -- even tho I've seen one of the owners adding milk to the crust mixture on TV. Milk, I thought, works against making the crust crispy, but instead more softer, chewy and tenderer. What's others' experience? As it stands now, I am not big on adding milk into the crust formulation and wonder about its inclusion. I've seen others (like Marc Malnati) send people off on wild goose chases with "misinformation" about formulations, oven temperatures, and recipes and wonder if that didn't happen here. But who knows. What do others' think? Peter, how do you think milk affects the crispness factor in thin crust pizzas?

I really don’t know a lot about Vito & Nicks pizzeria, because I never tasted their pizzas or even saw any videos of what the pizzas looked like until Peter posted the video. I don’t know if I can be of any help in trying to make a pizza I never tasted. I read this thread today and saw loowaters did make a thin crust pizza with milk added. I also saw on the Vito and Nick’s thread that you purchased some pies and showed pictures. If you guys want to give it a shot at trying milk in dough for Vito & Nicks type of pie, I will go along with also trying to make a pie that might be something like Vito & Nicks.

I have done a couple experiments with using milk or a milk mixture in dough. I am experimenting with milk kefir in the Lehmann dough and did experiment with a milk mixture in the sour Dough Modification for Lehmann dough. The Dough Modification for the Lehmann dough was based on wadave using a milk mixture for his pizzas. I think wadave does sheet his pizza dough. I was making a NY style pizza in both of my experiments. I haven’t had any problems so far with getting a crispy crust, but don’t know what will happen in a thin crust pizza.

When I watched that video of Vito & Nicks, I also wondered why they used milk in their dough, but can understand they might be using milk in their dough, since I had studied what wadave does in his pizzeria.

Let me know if anyone on this thread wants me to help or you can find any other information about Vito & Nick’s pizzeria.

I read that article at PMTT several times in the past, when I was experimenting to make the Sour Dough Modification for Lehmann dough. wadave on PMQTT has a pizza business in Australia. http://www.realpizzas.com/ He also uses milk in his dough, but uses a mixture of milk, flour and sugar, that is left to ferment, usually overnight.wadave’s pizzas look thin at his facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=150088&id=308250367901 but not thin like a Vito & Nicks pizza. His pizza do look like they brown well, but since I have never tasted them, I have no idea if the milk in his dough affects the final taste or characteristics of his crust.

I looked at the archives at Slice last evening and saw the video that was made at Vito & Nicks was done a few years ago. It makes me also wonder, like you, why they would give their secret recipe out, after being in business so many years. If that video does really tell how Vito & Nicks make their dough, maybe by letting the dough bulk ferment overnight. might have something to do with how the final dough then is different, if milk is used. I also read on another forum about if you order a Vito & Nicks pizza to order it par-baked to take home, so it will be crisp when reheated.

It should also be noted that not all of the milk contributes to the hydration of the dough. Milk (e.g., 2%) is about 89% water. The rest is fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, etc. These numbers suggest that it might be useful to increase the amount of water and/or milk to get closer to the original 50% hydration. Alternatively, the hydration percent can be increased before apportioning.

For hand kneaded doughs, I would modify the above formulations to use a bowl residue compensation of 2%.

General Comments. The V&N video purports to list the ingredients used to make the V&N pizza dough as flour, water, salt, yeast and milk. No mention is made of using any sugar or oil. If one looks at the V&N video at 0:48, a table can be seen to the left, near to the mixer, with a cup of salt, a small container of yeast, and a gallon of milk on that table. On the floor next to the table there are two bags of flour. There is also a large metal pot on the table, which I thought might contain water to be used to make the dough, but I did not see anything in the rest of the video to suggest that that was the case. Rosemary George, the woman in the T&N video, does not strike me as being cagey or duplicitous, so I can only assume at this point that there is no sugar or oil in the T&N dough or else they also would have been on the table. However, who is to say that in editing the video something of interest to us but not to the video editor was left out. As is obvious from the video, the ingredients are measured out by volume and there is a fair amount of estimating of the amounts to use. Accuracy is apparently not an issue since there is a lot of bench flour used in forming the dough balls to the proper condition and forming them into skins in the dough roller. It also appears that the dough, once made, is stored in tubs overnight for next day use. The room in which the dough is stored can be seen at 1:24 in the video. That room is not a cooler.

The Flour. The flour is definitely Ceresota flour, as BTB mentioned, as can be seen by the partial bag lettering at 0:48-0:49 in the V&N video. I estimated that the bags of flour weigh 25 pounds but, to be on the safe side, I went to the foodservice section of the Ceresota/Heckers website at http://www.heckersceresota.com/divisions.html to see if I could confirm my estimate. The large bag of the Ceresota flour, and the sibling Heckers flour as well, is shown in the middle of the array of different size bags of those flours. When I could not make out the weights of those flours from the packaging, even under magnification, I did a Google search and found sellers of those flour that give the weights of the large bags as 25 pounds. For example, for the Ceresota flour, see page 4 of http://www.buedelfoods.com/images/BUEDEL_CATALOG.pdf. I found a similar weight reference for the large bag of the Heckers flour in the 2010 catalog at the dairyland.com website. Since the V&N video says that 1 ˝ bags of the Ceresota flour are used, that is 37.5 pounds, or 600 ounces.

The Salt. As noted earlier, the V&N video shows what appears to be a full cup of salt on the table next to the mixer. On the assumption that that salt is ordinary table salt, one cup of that salt comes to about 9.45 ounces, or 1.58% of the weight of the Ceresota flour. That is a plausible figure.

The Yeast. I assume that the yeast used in the V&N video is instant dry yeast (IDY), since it is added to the mixer bowl without rehydration. It is possible that the yeast is active dry yeast (ADY) without the benefit of rehydration, but until better information comes to us, I will assume that the yeast is IDY, particularly since there is no sign that the water added to the mixer bowl was water at around 105 degrees F as is recommended for rehydrating ADY. I estimate, strictly on a visual basis, that the quantity of yeast used is about 1/3 cup. On that basis, and assuming that the yeast is IDY, the amount of yeast comes to about 1.7 ounces, or about 0.283% of the weight of the Ceresota flour. If my assumption is wrong and ADY is used (2.13 ounces), the corresponding baker’s percent is 0.356%. Both of these numbers might seem to be a bit on the low side at first blush but when used for a long room temperature fermentation, including overnight, they may be credible numbers. Also, large quantities of dough will ferment faster and behave differently than small quantities. A test of the value of yeast would be a dough rise that permits multiple punchdowns.

The Milk. About all we know about the milk is that one-half gallon of it is used to make the V&N dough. I thought perhaps the blue label and blue cap might tell me what kind of milk is used (e.g., whole milk, reduced-fat milk or nonfat) but when I spoke to the manager of the dairy department of a supermarket near me today, I was told that milk products are indeed color coded but that different suppliers have different coding systems. This is really not a major issue since the nutritiondata.self.website at http://nutritiondata.self.com/ treats the major forms of milk (whole, 1% and 2%) in the Nutrition Facts for the various types of milk as having equal weights per volume (although the nonfat is a bit higher). The major differences are in the amounts of fat, with a range of about 0-3.25% fat. In terms of weight, one-half gallon of milk, or two quarts, weighs about 1952 grams, or about 68.85 ounces. That comes to 11.48% of the weight of the Ceresota flour. On average, about 90% of the weight of milk is water. That is something that one might take into account in determining how much water to add to the dough to get the desired overall hydration. If I had to pick a milk to use, I think I would go with 2% milk. When V&N first started to make pizza, in 1949, whole milk was most likely used, and is perhaps still a good choice. But with changing dietary habits and a general move away from whole milk to lower fat milks since those forms were introduced in the 1950s, I suspect that V&N is also using lower fat milk products in its business, not only for its pizza dough but in the restaurant in general.

The Water. We know little about the water. However, just looking at the dough, I estimate the hydration to be over 65%. That may seem high but there is a lot of bench flour used in forming the dough balls and running them through the dough roller. That would have the effect of lowering the hydration to a more workable level.

The Effects of the Milk. As noted above, milk is mostly water, with the rest being solids including protein, milk sugars, fat, ash and various vitamins and minerals. Apparently V&N has concluded that using fresh milk without pre-scalding it to disable offending whey proteins (that can soften the dough too much) does not detract from the finished crusts. I would expect the milk to help the dough rise better, add flavor to the finished crust, and induce crust browning in the finished crust. One of the nice things about milk is that the lactose sugar in milk is not used as food by the yeast. That should allow one to ferment the dough for longer periods without running out of residual sugar to contribute to crust browning. The downside of lactose is that a crust can brown too quickly and lead to excessive crust browning. This might cause someone to pull the pizzas from the oven before they have baked long enough to develop the desired degree of crispiness. Without some experimentation, it is hard to say whether this can happen with about 12% milk. I have read of reports of the V&N crusts sometimes being too soft, but it is hard to say whether the cause is lactose related and pulling pizzas too soon, or simply inconsistencies in making and managing the dough (since everything is measured out volumetrically and estimated), or possibly because of the inability of the ovens to maintain heat at peak usage times.

With the above as background, I decided to take a stab at coming up with a test V&N clone dough formulation for a 12” pizza and a 14” pizza, the two sizes of pizzas shown in the menu at V&N’s website at http://www.vitoandnick.com/page1.html. The two dough formulations appear in the next post.

Peter

EDIT (8/30/13): For an alternative link to the Vito & Nicks YouTube video, see